The Final Everything Ecuador

hey everyone,

as the subject indicates, this will be the last installment of these emails, pretty much because i can tell you right now what my final two and a half weeks here is going to look like: writing, transcribing, translating, more writing, a little bit of travel, and even more writing.  these directed-independent study projects are a little overwhelming.  at least i´m a good way in already and its a topic i enjoy (indigenous medicine for a refresher).  30 pages in spanish here i come!

 

on to more important and actually interesting things:  these past two weeks have been life-changing. 

the first was our rural homestay in Cotacachi.  i was staying in a town called Morochos, about the size of a couple football fields.  there were six people from our group staying in this tiny town.  the rest of the group wass staying in towns in the surrounding area.  we had our own little house with its own bathroom, shower, and 3 really comfy beds and covers, facing the house that belonged to the family.  our family´s house (Vincent Chen was staying in the same place as me, though he spent a majority of his time with Lan who was at another house, just down the road) had four rooms: bathroom, living room (which was also home to the family´s only bedframe, no mattress, just a couple of straw mats, i guess the whole family cuddled up in there to sleep), dining room, and kitchen.  all that blatant inequality was pretty wack, but i guess if those are the furnishings that tourists like ourselves sometimes depend on to actually go visit a that place, i can´t really argue.  i would have been fine with a mat myself, but i know thats not most people.

the family was very very nice, though we often had communication problems.  our host-father and eldest host-sister were the only two that spoke conversationlevel spanish, about at the same level as mine, depending on the subject.  amongst themselves they spoke Quichua, which was fun at times because modern Quichua is a mix of spanish and quichua, because there are a lot of concepts that quichua just never invented (or needed to have) words for.  our host-father worked in construction, and pretty much drops everything when there are guests so that he can be tour guide, etc.  this made the initiative totally and utterly ours, which is why this part of the program is difficult for a lot of people.  the hosting families are very shy, especially ours, because of language and cultural barriers, and they don´t want to feel like they´re imposing on us, because we´re the guests.  but most of our group was really proactive and jumped at every opportunity they gave us.  i got to work in the garden, hoing up renegade weeds and kinoa, i got to shepherd which meant going out with the four cows, one burro, and handfuls of goats and sheep, and chase them around in the hills, making sure they didn´t eat the neighbors´ corn.  then i got really sick.  i think i finally figured out that it was the kinoa which they put in almost every soup (every meal except breakfast, but probably that too if you let them, included a soup and a main plate, it was a lot of food!) maybe i´m allergic?  finally threw up in the shower, because my butt was occupying the toilet.  it was gross.  atatai = how gross!  in Quichua.  that was Monday, by Wednesday i was finally feeling a little better, had my appetite back even if i couldnt keep anything down, so my host-father hands me this cup of clear liquid, says: "here!  herbal remedy!" well, no better way to work on a project that with first hand experience.  it was about two shots worth of the purest alcohol i´ve ever had.  the first meal i had had all week came back up about ten seconds later.  "feel better?" he asked...  kinda...  finally started taking the Traveller´s Diahrria pills my doctor had given me before i left.  turns out thats all it was and it cleared right up.  while being sick sucked, it still gave me tons of time for rest, reading (i started "A Force More Powerful: a century of nonviolent conflict" heady stuff), and more writing than i´ve done in ages.  it was great.

we got back on Thanksgiving Day to Quito.  we went out to our favorite falafel bar.  we all went around and said what we were thankful for.  it was precious.  i felt a little sacreligious not eating meat on Turkey Day, but we at least got the gluttony part down.

Friday morning we got to the airport, flew to Coca (half hour flight), total petrol town, then got onto a chiva (these huge buses that are open on either side and fit as many people as you can squeeze onto each bench, they have seating on top too, but thats where our luggage went) which took us to the Rio Napo, got on a boat for two hours, another chiva for another two, and another boat on the Rio Tiputini for an unmeasurable amount of time.  the whole process took the whole day and we finally got to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Amazon jungle after it got dark.  what an incredible place.  apparently its one of THE most biologically diverse spots on the planet.  other than the occasional sounds of helicopters going in and out of oildrilling spots, and the generator which went on only to prepare lunch and then again for dinner, you´re surrounded by constant nature sounds.  i am even more of a believer now that the Amazon invented everything first.  there were so many sounds that should have been coming from a DJ´s board or a synthesizer or some other computerized thingamajig, but they were birds!  or poison tree frogs!  or monkeys!  it literally got to the point that we would be walking along one of the many trails and say casually "oh it´s just more monkeys"  it was sooo cool!  i quickly figured out that this would be an awesome place to stay and talk to someone about medicinal plants that could be found there.  so after wrestling with our director (grrr), i got to stay until the next boat left, the next friday.  i got up early with everyone else (breakfast was served daily at 630...  not that you could sleep much past that with all the birds heralding the sun) on monday, watched them pack up and waved to them from the dock.  while our whole group was there (both the university and cultural exchange programs from Pitzer) there was another group from BU of bio students who had been there for a month, but they left on monday with our groups.  this meant that once they were gone, it was only me on our side of camp.  the nicer cabins on the other side still held two primatologists, and three researchers working on insect substrate-communication.  it was so much more quiet.  especially since our cabins were essentially wallless, having screens facing out, and the walls that separated the two cabins per building were so thin that you could almost hear people breathing through them.  gone from filled with college kids, to just me.  it was weird.  every morning i went out with one of the guides, who was a local guy of the Quichua people (who had actually only been in the jungle for about 400 years, so their knowledge of the surrounding plants were not as vast as, say the Huaorani, but knowledgeable nonetheless), i got about an hour and a half worth of video footage of him talking about plants. disp? yeah, i did that.  we´d return for lunch, after which i would take a nap to sleep through the hottest part of the day.  reminded me of it when you said that tara.  its so humid there that we had to keep our electronics in a dry box in the library which was the only building at the station with electricity 24hrs a day, except when we had generator problems... that was almost a disaster)  woke up whenever (or when the heat woke me up) continue reading, and get up to go on a hike by myself, coming back in time to watch the sunset over the Rio Tiputini.  tried my damnedest to get that on film, but it just does not compare.  we got to see tons of monkeys (woolies, howlers, spidermonkeys, squirrelmonkeys, and capuchins) when the whole group was there because they were as curious of the racket that we were making down on the ground as we were of their racket up in the trees.  but once people left and it was quieter, i got to see a giant ant eater (so big!  and it has these really long fingernails that it can use to kill jaguars if it wants cuz they´re made for ripping trees open to find the termites, so we had to be wary of its short-sightedness), squirrels (ooo, squirrels... how nice... they´re actually pretty rare in the Amazon), an aguti (pretty much a giant guinea pig), a weasle thing, and two snakes (called wind snakes because they´re so fast).  i didnt get to see any big cats, mostly because they nocturnal, but they have a bunch of motionsensor cameras around the trails that pick up all the wildlife, so we got to see those photos, for a lot of these animals its the first time they´ve been photographed in their natural habitat.  funded by national geographic.  amazing amazing amazing place.  if you go to one place in ecuador go to the galapagos, if you go to two, go to tiputini.  there´s something magical about being that isolated (you could travel for days in any direction (except the one we came in) and not find another human being or sign of "civilization"), in the center of nature´s biggest metropolis, there´s just such a feeling of living things all around you.  oh yeah and the ants suck!  some are as long as my finger, and pretty much all of them bite, a stinging sensation that lasts for hours.  you don´t touch anything you havent inspected first, and even then, only when you need to to not fall down in the mud.  the galoshes that they provide for everyone are really fun, makes you want to romp through the puddles.  unfortunately i had to refrain because i had only packed enough clothing for the weekend... not an entire week.  on wednesday i finally asked one of the directors if they had any tshirts for sale because i was out of clean ones... he said "oh yeah, i thought you might have that problem.  did you want us to do some laundry for you?"  i have never been more thankful.  now i´ve seen everything, washers and dryers in the Amazon.  i bought the shirt anyway.

 

still haven´t heard back from the study abroad office about china, so its becoming less and less a possibility.  which means i´ll be returning to Pitzerland in the spring.  but a lot can change in two weeks.  even if i do go to china, the program doesnt start until midfebruary, so i´m planning on spending some time at pitzer in the interim (stupid major declaration form...).

 

alright i´ll let you guys get back to your finals studying, you procrastinators.  and if you left this for after finals, you have more selfcontrol than i would.  cheers.

 

miss ya.  hope to hear from ya.  see ya soon!

 

smiles

Ben

Everything Ecuador III

hey everyboday,

 

i realize its been a long time since the last one of these, so get comfy.  two weeks ago today we officially finished classes here in quito.  it was kinda sad cuz we had to say goodbye to our favorite teacher on earth, Raquel who had lead us through a great literature class.  poetry, types of literature.  parts of our exams were simply, interpret this poem, or even better, write a poem about this image.  it was great.  though admittedly the prevailing feeling was relief, at being done with the academia, done with quito.  quito is a dirty city.  the cars are fast and reckless and use their horn at any tiny opportunity.  its still amazing to me though how something, even something i wouldnt normally like, could feel comforting just because of its familiarity.  i can successfully find my way around, get myself lost and back, know the general cost of a cab ride from A to B (and accordingly debate it out with taxistas trying to rip off the knownothing gringo).  even more so now that we´ve been gone for a bit and come back to it.

 

my birthday was wonderful though i was feeling a bit of the touristas (translation: uncontrolable colon).  i chose to look at it as a bodily cleansing in preparation for my 22nd year on the planet.  the day saturday before, devon and i had gone to see an indigenous shaman just north of quito in the highlands somewhere, in preparation for our directed-independent study projects (his on shamanism, mine on indigenous medicine), and we both got spiritually cleansed there by him.  it was kind of a weird experience though because we went with a class from the bourgie Universidad de San Francisco de Quito.  we all had to wait outside the tiny, electicityless healing room in a bare room (with only one lightbulb, three benches, and a curtain in the doorway to the outside).  the cleansing consisted of us taking our shirts off, getting eucalyptus branches and fresh eggs shaken all over us, and chewed up flower petals, tobacco smoke and alcohol spit on us.  there was a lot of chanting in Quichua which i wish i could have understood. 

thanks for all of your bday notes and love.  it was all greatly appreciated.

 

we had a fiveday vacation after classes were over before we had to be back in time for the plane to peru.  many plans fell through before we (devon, dane, dane´s hostbrother jaime, and me) just decided to go back to Mindo, since Dane had never been anyway.  we jumped the 12m (apparently it had grown since i had been there last...) water falls like 5 or 6 times a piece, hiked to others, went ¨tubing¨ (just like what it sounds, 7 innertubes, lashed together in order to get down a river too shallow for rafting; we had the added luck of it being REALLY low so we got stuck on a lot of rocks:) down a river for three hours (devon and i forgot sunscreen on our legs, we´re still peeling right now...), and went to a butterfly conservatory, one of the only in south america, which was great because they´re totally used to human interaction and will just come to chill on your shirt or in your hair for an hour. 

 

at this point we ran out of money because i was stupid enough not to get money before we left and Mindo doesnt have any banks.  so we pooled together what we had left and convinced a bus driver to give us a discount (even though ¨you guys are from the richest country in the world!¨) to Santo Domingo de los Colorados. 

 

we found the Tsachila outdoor museum where we got to play with the paint that they use from fruits on their bodies and the bright red on their hair.  the black is now finally fading away.

 

the Incan trail took us 3 days.  Cusco is a cute, very colonial, very touristy town that sits in the mtns higher than Quito.  every day of hiking was a full one.  it felt like all we did was sleep, eat, hike, eat, hike, eat, sleep, but not always in that order.  our first pass was on the second day.  its call the Paso de la Mujer Muerte (the pass of the dead woman) and sits at 13,487 ft above sea level.  we all felt like we had asthma when our last footstep hit the top.  we got extraordinarily lucky with rain, it only rained once while we were hiking, the rest of the time only at night, safely in our crappy leaking tents.  don´t put anything you want dry near the edges, like your feet or head.  yay fetal position!  still not sure why dane, devon and i, three of the tallest guys on our trip shared a tent.  yay body heat!  there´s really no fair way to describe the trail nor arriving at Machupicchu itself.  i´ll send photos when i get a chance.  its a magical place that sits on a mountain ridge at the very edge of the Peruvian Amazon.  our second day at Machupicchu we got up hella early to avoid the crowds and watched the morning fog lift from the sight, then climbed Waynapicchu (picchu means mountian in Quichua, the lengua franca of the Inca), the hill in the background of the famous photos of Machupicchu.  the view is 360 degrees at the top.  its amazing how stairs can change your hiking style.  i look back at the 166 photos i took on the trip and still have a hard time telling myself that it really happened.  definitely one of the coolest things i´ve ever done in my life.

 

tomorrow we leave for our 10 day rural homestay with indigenous communities in Cotacachi.  i´m really looking forward to that.  i´ll be sure to let yáll know how that all goes.

 

hope that you´re all doing well.  i know i´ve forgotten something to tell you that i meant to, but its getting late here, i haven´t packed and i had to spend all day today in an internet cafe picking classes for next semester that i may not even end up taking if i end up getting to go to china.  cuidense todos, y diviertense demasiado. (i love that asha :)

 

smiles

Ben

Everything Ecuador II

hey y'all,

sorry this has been so long in coming.  but here it is.  so there.

just after sending that last check in ecuador thingy i got mugged.  i figured out that my bus wasn't running so i decided to catch another one that was conveniently situated on the other side of la Parque Carolina.  three guys vs me. no knives or guns, gracias a dios. they made off with all my electronic things but i managed to beg with them in spanish to leave me my backpack, schoolbooks, and the clothes i had been carrying from being away for the weekend.  oh and the clothes on me.  it would have been a drag to have my shoes stolen (as is pretty typical) because they don't sell shoe sizes above like 9 here (mine are 12-13).  i was physically unhurt but pretty shaken, and i still tense up at odd times walking around the city.  perhaps the worst part was that the following thursday, i was walking with Laura (she goes to Wesleyan, is on our program, is awesome) got robbed right outside of la Mariscal aka Gringolandia by two black guys with a butter knife.  but believe me, when a knife of any kind is pointed at your chest in the dark, you can only really see long and shiny and a strong arm behind it.  they only got ten bucks off each of us before one of the guardias came strolling up and scared them away.  probably the universe telling me that these things happen.

the weekend before last we went to Mindo which is in this tropical, jungly, mountainous area.  its gorgeous and was wonderful for soothing the anxious, "i've just been robbed... twice" soul.  we ate churrasco which is a local specialty of two fried eggs, beef, rice, and avocado, cucumber and tomato.  mix it all together and of course a healthy helping of Aji (i'm honestly thinking of setting up an importation business for Aji its the most amazing hot sauce ever).  it was really good.  we also hiked to a couple of the million waterfalls around, jumped off of a 36 ft high waterfall (WHAT a rush!), hung out at a reggae bar, and kicked it with the local hippie jewelry makers from all over the world (Carrie kept saying "i wanna go to the hippie plaza!").  its one of the first places in the world that i've actually fallen in love with.  we're going back again for my birthday weekend.

i found a capoeira class last week that meets in the evenings, which is making it even harder for me to see my host family ever which sucks, but its a lot of fun and i'm making a lot of local friends through it, not to mention kickass exercise.  Laura taking the classes too.  our mestre is Marco who is 22, which i just found out from Laura, but he looks like he's in his late 20s, maybe 30.  its weird, but his story checks out.  its so great to finally be playing capoeira again! (stupid rugby shoulder)


we went to the beach this last weekend, just north of the touristy beachbum town of Atacames, called Tonsupa.  we stayed in a house owned by Dane's host family and packed 8 of us in two rented cars.  we went a little nuts at the grocery store so we barely fit into the tiny tiny cars they gave us.  yknow those tiny cars they have in ireland to fit between the hedged wall and the oncoming mack truck?  that small.  the whole weekend was really relaxed.  the house was only a 5 minute walk from the beach and we met up with another part of our group that was staying in a hostel in atacames.  the water was really really warm (almost 80 degrees) but compared to the beating sunshine out of it, it felt wonderfully cool.

we ended grammar classes for spanish last week, and this week started studying Indigenous Cultures of Ecuador, basically an anthropology class all in spanish for 3 hours every morning.  we went back to the Museo Del Ecuador today for a look at colonial up until today art.  its a really interesting class and i'm grateful to be learning stuff, but we dont get much spanish practice, so we have to rely on our own devices for local practice.  the teacher is from the University of San Francisco de Quito, which is where the other Pitzer program is.  she's very nice but refuses to have people disagree with her ever, so we get to argue semantics with her in spanish which is fun.

thats all for now.  hope you all are doing great.  if you write me i swear i'll write you back, i'd love to hear stories from the homefront, whatever they entail.

smiles
Ben

Everything Ecuador

hey there everyone,

 

as the title suggests, i´m in beautiful Ecuador at the moment!

it´s really hard to believe that i´ve only been here for two weeks.  wait, not even that, 11 days.  it always amazes me how differently time moves when you get to a new place.  there´s so much new information to absorb that its hard to keep up, never mind things like actually communicating in a different language and adapting to a new culture.  and believe me, they are many: our spanish teacher was absolutely astonished to here of all the liberties and options a woman has surrounding pregnancy, and namely abortion; its very, very normal, in fact in many cases actually encouraged, for a man to have a mistress while he also has a wife(amante, is the official spanish word for it, but only while married), or multiple girlfriends at the same time.

 

the food has also been a big surprise: someone i ran into while travelling with soni in guatemala had said that the food here was kind of bland and that they didnt have much hot, spicy things.  this could not be further from the truth.  everything here is so tasty, and they have this amazing sauce called Aji which they put on literally EVERYTHING, soups, vegetables, rice, meat, deserts, you name it, they do it.  it is some of the best hot sauce i´ve ever had.

 

we started off staying in a hostel with the whole group to kind of meet and get aclimated to each other and the altitude (i´m now sitting in the middle of Quito, at 9,300 ft above sea level.  in those first couple of days we would get winded just walking the stairs to our rooms, and i only had two sets of two stairs apiece.  now its a little bit better, but i still had a really hard time playing soccer with the kids at my volunteer sight yesterday, which is even a little bit higher into the mtns in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city (and therefore the stereotypically ¨BAD¨ neighborhood; we got warned not to carry backpacks and that our shoes might get stolen, even though no one in the country has feet the size of mine, unless they´re also studying abroad here).  but hands down, this volunteership is the coolest thing i´ve ever done.  the kids range from about 4-16 and are SO happy to see us there, and so eager to show us around and be patient with our varying levels of spanish.  working there are me, nathan, and devon from pitzer, and simone and dwight who both go to swarthmore college (how uppity is that name, i mean really! try saying it with a british accent).  although, now that i think about it, the hard of breath part may have been in part due to the fact that the soccer field is actually a dirt field, so i wasnt even inhaling air.  dwight and i had a black boogers contest at the end of the game.

 

my host family is very very nice and welcoming but pretty upper crust.  they had to ask the live-in maid, Maria, about the buses that i should take to get to my classes because they´re the top percent of the population that only drive everywhere, like maniacs, dare i say it, even more maniacly than costa ricans.  i have my own section of the flat with my own bathroom and shower.  my ecuadorian mom, Lucia, and dad, Gustavo, work they´re own company, she´s an architect, he´s an engineer.  and no moms, i havent told them yet that you´re a landscape designer, and that grampa was an engineer.  i havent really found an appropriate moment to talk about my family with them yet, cuz that stuff is very shush shush here.  but dont worry i will.  so because they own they´re own business, and have a live-in maid, neither of them really work with a real definite schedule, so these last couple of days i havent seen them more than to just say hi, because i leave before they do on the bus in the morning, and they don´t return until right around the time that i´m leaving to go meet up with friends.  i´m also one of the furthest from the school so i dont have time to make it back home for lunch like others do.  its definitely nice to have the alone, down time, but it gets kinda lonely too.  i was excited to stay in quito this weekend to spend some more time with them, but they already have plans to go to the beach, and won´t be returning till monday morning which is when i have class.  my host brother is also very nice, Juan (but they call him Juannico) and clearly the baby of the family.  he´s in his second year of university as a med student, and his mom still treats him like he´s seven.  she calls him her ´rey´ or king for the nonspanish speakers.  i also have a host sister named Ana Lucia (or Analu), who´s 26 and has two darling little girls seven and five who´s names are escaping me at the moment.  i watched Lady and the Tramp dubbed in spanish with them the other night, and got to say EEEEW at the spaghetti kissing part with the five-year-old as she jumped under the covers of her grandma´s bed.  the seven-year-old just thought we were being way too immature.

 

classes are classes, that at least has a familiar sense of boredom surrounding it.  we´re finally kicking into our normal schedule next week (what we´ll have for the months of sept and oct, then travelling the entire month of nov).  so that will be nice.  it is interesting to learn about the new culture and to begin to express myself in spanish, but classroom learning it so monotonous, especially when you´re in a different country.  is there really a point to studying a different country your in from a classroom?  why can´t we be outside all the time?  and yeah i´m definitely aware that that ruins the necesity for tests, but why does book knowledge have to count for so much more than the experiential kind?  doesnt that kinda defeat the purpose of studying abroad other than just an escape from the classrooms that you´re used to?  i can´t wait to go back to my volunteership.  sorry i´ll step down from the soapbox now.

 

last weekend we went to the Festival de Yamor, which was a very touristy indigenous festival of some kind in a town called Otavalo, just north of Quito.  it featured a parade on friday night, tons of dancing and suspiciously similar music (i still say they used to same song over and over again, but that might just be me being culturally insensitive), and literally endless street markets.  i couldnt help myself, i bought some really really comfy house-pants that i wear around the house every chance i get, even though everyone makes fun of me for it, especially juan and maria.  they have a similar solstice celebration up there on the 21st of sept to celebrate the fact that the sun is directly in the middle of the sky, so we´re definitely going back with all the people that for whatever reason couldnt go last time.

 

my spanish is definitely better than it was at the beginning of the costa rica program this summer.  and as marcus so eloquently put it, i´m beginning to actually have a personality when speaking it, not constantly monotonous translation and information exchange.  i´ve met some pretty cool people here, striking up conversations with taxi drivers and the guard that sits in the wooden box on my street to guard us from the dangerous have-nots.  eveyone says quito is super dangerous, but its not any more dangerous than san francisco, berkeley, boston, new york, definitely not more dangerous than oakland.  of course i´ve now doomed myself on the walk home tonight (straight up hill by the way, and i´m not talking about claremont uphill, this is like lombard street steep without the switchbacks).  i´ve been feeling kind of lonely and homesick lately, but its probably because i´m tired, we´ve been going out to the party district a bunch(Gringolandia as the locals love to call it); its definitely not for lack of food!  the other night, Dane´s host brother, jaime, was out with us at a club, grabs me and throws me at this pair of girls dancing together.  he strikes up a dancing conversation with one, forcing me into a dancing conversation with the other.  she was from Cuenca (just south), which i happened to be a recent expert on, since that was where my taxi driver was from on the way over, very conveniently.  i left with devon not long after that, which was good because jaime later told me that the boyfriends of the two girls were eying the two of us a little intensely.

 

alright already, thats enough for now, should keep you busy trying to read that whole thing for the next couple of weeks until i have more fun stories to tell.

i wish you all the best this semester and whereever you may be.  and write me back please, it lets me know that you´re actually recieving this (i dont entirely trust the computers in this country, this one randomly shut down on its own while i was trying to write this, thank god for gmail autosave), and i love to hear of any and all things going on back on home turf.  i promise write back if you do, there´s your incentive carrot.

 

love and miss you all.

 

smiles

Ben

Costa Rica Chronicles, Part 4?

ok ok, not really, we´ve been out of costa rica now for like 3 days.  after our program ended last thursday, everyone had a relax and take care of last minute biz day on friday, then we all went out for one last night on the town all together that night.  soni and i were the only ones in the group that night that were not going to the airport in the big mass of claremont kids in the morning, so we had to say our goodbyes as people haphazardly got into cabs for the last ride to our host families homes.  it was sad, and great to see how close we had gotten in just six weeks.

 

that saturday (damn, i can´t believe it was just a week ago), soni and i took off for a relaxing weekend off before we hit the road for good.  we took a taxi to the bustop in san jose to another taxi to the ferry across the Gulf of Nicoya in northern costarica on the pacific.  from there it was a two hour busride to Montezuma... but the bus was packed full of people standing... so we arranged to share a cab with two Ticos (costa ricans) who were stuck in the same pickle.  the road was so full of pot holes that our cab driver would drive on the unpaved shoulder of the road when it was exposed (on either side) because it was far less bumpy than the actual "road" itself.  once finally in monezuma (or Montefuma, as the locals like to call it) we ran into a girl that had just graduated from pomona named Lauren, that Soni knew from the soccer team!  certain wonderful places in the universe attract certain types of people i guess.  it was a beautiful spot literally sandwiched between the beach and a mtn.

 

we returned to soni´s host mom´s house because she had left some of her things there for the weekend, and we had been invited for dinner before we left the country for good.  there was already another study abroad student living there, and we got to play the sage gurus of all things cool in the area, all the cool places to go out at night, meet, check out, etc.  talking to soni´s host mom we realized that all the costa rican schools had just been freed into a two week vacation (they pretty much have year round school, not a huge summer break like in the states), and that we should have booked our bus tickets out to guatemala like two weeks beforehand.  seeing the look of near panic she had created on our faces, she promptly gets on the phone with Tica Bus and starts working out with them what can be done.  here´s the weird part, on the phone they said that the closest spots available were on like saturday (this was tuesday at this point, and we had been planning to leave the next morning by just showing up, our lonely planet guide had said nothing about needing to book it ahead of time, nor the people at ICADS where our program was).  thankfully when we showed up at the station we were able to get tickets for thursday morning that would make the trip in a day and a half on an ejecutivo bus rather than a directo which would take three days.  so we spent wednesday bumming around san jose.  i took soni to the VIP movie theatre that serves you beer and food in your LayZBoy seat, we saw Over the Hedge, which was very good and had some nice suburban social commentary (i would definitely recommend it for you candice, if you havent seen it already).  thursday was 18 hours on a bus with bad pirated movies, and half a documentary on the WWF Champ the Rock (who speaks about himself in the third person).  that night we spent in San Salvadore, El Salvadore, and then again on two buses in the morning to Guatemala City, and out to Panajachel on the banks of Lago de Atitlan (the last leg of the journey the chickenbus dropped up off early because they were continuing on to Quetzaltenango, so waiting for the other bus we got picked up by a guy originally from upstate NY, and used to sell coffee near San Francisco, who now owns a coffee shop in Pana; we talked with him a lot about guatemala and this area, and he talked at us a lot about how scary and scared the US is getting, "to the point of paranoia in some areas!")

 

the shops here are chock full of indigenous woven goods, beautiful indigos and bright colors.  its a pretty touristy town so it was easy to find an internet cafe.  this morning we walked a little over an hour to the next town over for breakfast (recommended by the coffee guy... Mike i think his name was).  we´ve been meeting tons of travelers along the way, all nice and willing to help.  knowing some spanish has helped us too help other travellers who speak little to none at all, which always kind of baffles me.  last night we went for urugayan food in a restaurant with live music, but not before soni taught me some qi gong down by the lake.  we were going to go out for some live music, but i havent been feeling so hot for a bit now so i simply past out during our "nap" after dinner, and could not be woken again.  i felt bad for soni.  i made it up to her by getting up early this morning to watch the sunrise on our walk to that other town before most people were on the roads going to work.

 

i think today after lunch we´re going to try to bargain our way onto a boat tour around the lake a little, and maybe go to the other town on the lake our guidebook described as having a "good spiritual vibe" which is why it is home to many holistic therapy and meditation centers.  cheesy, hell yeah, but it could be fun. relaxing for sure.  everything is mad cheap here compared to Costa Rica.  kinda reflective of the lower standard of living.

 

anyway, time to run to the bank cuz our first round of Quetzals has run out already with all these brightly decorated and jesus´d out chickenbuses (all old american school buses that get driven at least 10-20 miles faster than they should be on these windy mtn roads), and our hotel which is the cutest thing since sliced bread.

 

i hope you all are doing fabulously and that i hear from each of you soon!  thanks to everyone who has responded, i love hearing from you guys too.  oh and on that note: jahan, you´re insane :)  stay safe, dude

 

many smiles

Ben

Costa Rica Chronicles, Part 3

hey ev´rybody,

well, here we go into the final stretch of the program, less than a week to go!  everyone is pretty burned out by this point, and really just want to relax and not think about the spanish final and the program final that we have to do this week.  but!  here goes nothin´ the last haul before a relaxing two and half weeks of travelling! 

we got back from nicaragua yesterday.  the eight hour bus ride that is actually only about six hours of sitting on the bus and two hours of getting everyone through customs at the border.  made me think a lot about how spoiled we get with customs at international airports that they take care of a majority of the paperwork through computers and the flight plan.  i had to remind myself that the impatience of the others in the group with this lethargic process by bus had a lot to do with the fact that it was their first experience with it.  jeez that was an awkward sentence.  anyway, the whole group was kind of on edge, getting tired of one another going into the trip, so i´m not sure a straight week of unadulterated "us" time was what we needed...  the week was really good though, and no one ended up killing each other (although we did get in a bit of trouble for partying a little too hardy in the hotel, cuz the hotel was small enough that our group took up every room, so we figured we´d be alright... oops).  we visited a Precario (literally "precarious") kind of a shanty town, with houses made out of metal sheets and whatever plywood they could find, that was originally a squator community.  in costa rica, the same situation of a neighborhood eventually got the help of the government to install electricity, water services and waste disposal, but in nicaragua the people had to depend entirely on nonprofit organizations for the little help that they got.  everyone worked, even the children, and these were the people who had decided to stay in nicaragua, and not take their entire family across the border illegally to work in the banana and pineapple plantations in costa rica  that we got to visit the week before (they wouldnt let us take any cameras in)(all US owned and operated companies).  in the rainy season, lake nicaragua would flood the surrounding area and the Precario that we were in, forcing everyone to live in two feet of water.  an NGO that we visited was helping them build housing that was above the floodline for 250 american dollars, and providing some of the labor.  for comparison´s sake: working on a banana plantation, the average man works 12-16 hours a day and is paid on a piece rate system in teams of three, who must split about 17 colones per bunch of bananas.  they earn approximately 6000 colones per day which is about 12 american dollars, in the humid hot hot heat perfect for growing bananas.  most of the work is tough manual labor because it is cheaper for these companies to NOT mechanize the process because when profits drop they can simply fire people.  against costa rican law, these people have no benefits whatsoever.  this is considered a good wage compared to many of the jobs in nicaragua.  and yeah things are cheaper here, but not even close to the difference in wages.  i was talking to some of the others on our program about coming back to nicaragua next summer to volunteer and help build houses (by the by, each house has five rooms, including a bathroom, kitchen, living room and two bedrooms.  many times for a family of six or seven since more children means more people working for the benefit of the family. 
walking around the Precario i was hit by an epiphanal moment: nearly all of the uneasy energy between our group of americans walking around in our flipflops and digital cameras, and the people who´s neighborhood we were overtaking, all of this awkwardness could be dispelled simply by saying hello, by approaching them as one human being to another.  it really drove home for me the power of presentation.  people were more than willing to talk with us and show us all the hard work that they had done on these houses, once it was initiated.  something as simple as "buenos dias."  recognizing the dignity in another. 

we spent saturday on the shore of a beautiful lake just to the north of Granada (where we were staying, kind of a preserved, colonial, tourist town), at an amazing hostel (only 20 bucks a night).  i´m not sure if they think that because we go to an expensive private school that we need to be babied and will accept nothing less than the lap of luxury, but we keep staying in these places that cost a whole bunch on trips.  i´m not saying i dont appreciate it, but i would be fine staying in the hostel in Granada for 7 dollars a night where there are a whole bunch of other international travelling our age living out of backpacks, as opposed to taking over an entire hotel for 50 dollars a night.  we all keep saying that we wish we could see a breakdown of where the thousands of dollars we spent to go on this trip is actually going.  sorry for that rant: the lake was gorgeous and we just lounged around all day.  there was another group there, or maybe seven people, from israel.  the place owned two kayaks, and out in one, i got burned... again.  don´t worry though this time its not second degree.  i was out for over an hour trying to find Soni, who had been gone for like two hours by that time in the other kayak. (how do you lose someone on a lake?  i guess it was big enough, though it didnt look it, it was 6 km across).  burning and hungry, i came back to find that she had come back from the other side that i wasnt looking on so much. 

AH! i can´t wait until this week is done and over.  i feel like its the end of last semester all over again...

i hope that you´re all doing fabulously, and that i get to hear from you soon, i love getting email, it makes me happy and feel like someone is actually reading these extra-ordinarily long emails. toodles 

smiles
Ben

Costa Rica Chronicles, Part 2

hola chicos,

lucky you, its time for another update.

two weekends ago we went to Manuel Antonio, a very touristy spot on the pacific coast.  the three of us boys spent three hours in the ocean with nothing more than SPF 4 on... my skin is still peeling off my back today from the 2nd degree burn i got.  don´t worry i learned my lesson, and the blisters were really tiny.  in the evenings the whole group went dancing (in this wall-less place with mirrors everywhere, and a bunch of creepy guys watching the tourists dance), skinny dipping, and probably some other things.  it was so humid and hot (partially because of the burn) that i was shirtless pretty much the whole time. 

and then this last weekend we went to a cloud forrest, San Gerardo de Dota.  it was SOOO beautiful, the food was amazing, they even cooked the fish that Soni and David caught in the stocked river.  we hiked to two waterfalls through actual, primary rainforest, one was about 20 ft high and had a cave carved out right next to it that you could climb into to watch the waterfall.  the second was about 60-70 ft high, absolutely amazing.  the trails were so allovertherplace that there were ropes everywhere we had to use to get there.  we also went birdwatching for quetzals with a guide who taught us tons about the biology surrounding us (i was in heaven!), horseback riding, and played soccer with the guys that worked there one morning. 

my internship has been really good, i´ve learned a ton at the Clinic, not to mention that my spanish is getting worked.  they let me give shots in the injections clinic, i watched a gunshot wound get cleaned, got to hold a baby of a mother while she got a pap smear, and go twice a week into the community both for domilicary visits and for primary medicine (education, blood pressure and sugar checks, both of which i was taught to do), its so hard to follow the accents and fast spanish of the people in the community, especially when they get going on their opinions of the health care system.  med school is only six years of college here, instead of two different schools, four apiece, like in the States, so the doctors are only a couple of years older than I am.  the one i directly report to has good conversational english skills, but doesnt know medicinal english, and my spanish is pretty much the same, so we teach each other the medicinal language in our native tongue.  it also never ceases to amaze me how much power the white coak of a doctor has, people treat me differently in the clinic when i´m wearing mine and when i´m not. 

my host family is still great, understanding when i come home after a long day of internship and spanish classes and stumble over every word cuz my brain is sapped.  i find my english is getting worse as my spanish gets better so that now i can´t communicate period.  a group of us went to twoforone movie night on wednesday (every movie theatre in the city, which works out to be $1.6 a person), and i invited my host sister.  we saw X3, which i loved (even though the writing kinda sucked), and would love to discuss the finer points of it with any of you who are willing (Jacob, you especially). 

we´re going to see an active volcano this weekend, Arenal, which is especially active right now, so unfortunately we can´t climb it, but i´m looking forward to watching the lava glow from afar, sitting in the hot springs with the swim up bar. we were going to go to a banana plantation today, and then on to the Carribean coast to Puerto Viejo, which is another kind of touristy place.  but we decided to do all that next weekend because no one will be at the banana plantation today because ------> 

the first game of the world cup of soccer is going on right now, and i just heard everyone yelling and screaming, meaning the game at least won´t be a shutout.  costa rica vs germany, we dont stand a chance cuz we´ve got three injured players and the game is in germany.  but heres hoping.  the whole country is going nuts, and all public employees (like half the country) have the day off, as well as many other people who will simply not work today.  the whole country stopped. 

i hope that all of you are having a great summer, and that i hear from y´all soon.
peace and elbow grease.

smiles
Ben 

The Costa Rica Chronicles, Part 1

hey everybody!

i´m in costa rica!  and its amazing!
i love my host family.  i have a 21 year old sister who doesnt talk to me a bunch and is kind of a gossip.  she´s a student living at home.  my mom stays at home except on some weekends and week days when she volunteers for a local orphanage.  and my dad and brothers (the brothers are 22 and 25) are hardly ever home because they work a lot.  Don Francisco, my dad, is kind of a prankster who loves to tell stories and takes the time to make sure i understand his jokes.  even if he has to explain them to me three times.  my spanish is good enough that i can speak with them, but my vocabulary limitted enough that i often miss important things.  should make my internship at a local health clinic interesting.  i have my first interview and scheduling meeting with them today, so i have to wear a tie. 

we´ve gone out nearly every night.  found the only microbrewery in the country, conveniently located 5 blocks from my house.  Soni and Melissa and David (from CMC) also live really close to me so we´ve gone over there twice now.  the waitress recognized us.  i mean, we are pretty americanlooking :) 

on wednesday its half price movie night, which roughly figures to about $1.60 per person.  we went to see the davinci code.  there were moans in the audience at the fake ending...  it was subtitled so when they spoke french and latin we had to read them and translate really fast.  thank god i had seen it already so i kinda knew what was going on. 

last night we had a cultural night at the institute where all of our classes and spanish classes are.  a guy came and taught us some merengue, salsa, and reggaeton.  it was so much fun.  melissa was such a good sport about my two left feet.  we tried out our dancing moves at the bar two cuz they had a live band. 

we´re leaving for Manuel Antonio this weekend, a kinda touristy rainforrest preserve thats also coincidentally right on the beach.  i can´t wait.  i totally need to unwind a bit.  i find that even my english doesnt come to me very well any more because my brain is in the habit of having to think about exactly what i want to say and how to say it before itll let the words come out.  my spanish is getting sooo much better just in this week, but i have a long way to go too.  i can speak with people and generally relay information, but i want to be able to commicate, to get innuendo and meanings behind words, and ultimately use them.  the three hours of spanish class every day should at least help. 

i miss you all already and hope that you´re having adventures of your own.  
que le vaya bien.

smiles
Ben

ps  don´t recognize the email address? yeah its new, the yahoo account got too inundated with spam, so this is for people that i actually know ;-)  if you want, send me an email address that you actually will check too, cuz for most of you i just have your school accounts, which can be dangerous 
pss hey candice and lindi, i forgot to write down dotie´s and carmen´s email addresses before i left, could you forward this to them for me, as well as have them send me a quick note so i can have it for the future? thank you please